Go to the Head of the Class

A Chicago area school district knew their technology wasn’t making good grades. Their data center and Wi-Fi systems were too old to keep up with new teaching styles. Students were working on laptops that often couldn’t connect, and even when they did, Wi-Fi was slow and always at risk of cutting out. Sometimes teachers would have to scrap lesson plans that needed computers until IT was able to fix them – the solutions were usually just a band aid for their bandwidth issues.

Mindsight says…

This lack of connection wasn’t working for a school district that prides itself on using technology to enrich students’ education, so they turned to us. We’re Mindsight, a Chicago-area IT consultant and a Cisco Gold partner. We got our start selling IT hardware, but we found our clients needed our expertise beyond just servers and switches. Now, we provide IT services and solutions that help clients get to where they need to be.

Defining that roadmap is the first thing we did with the school district. We learned they were building a new administrative building, so our first recommendation was to add a new data center. We also recommended they use Cisco’s reliable UCS servers and Cisco Meraki wireless access points, to send Wi-Fi to the spots where students and staff needed it most.

With our help, the school district has seen their floor-to-ceiling data center shrink to a mere half stack. And they’ve replaced a nest of tangled wires with just 12 cables. This isn’t simply an organizational feat—it means no more dropped connections and much lower costs. And our disaster recovery solution gives the district peace of mind and the ability to manage the solution without any special skills.

With better connections and a simplified data center, students get the technology they need to learn. And the Chicago area school district can be proud of the up-to-date education they provide.